Turkey Reaches Out to Kurds, Hoping to End 25-Year Conflict

Turkey’s prime minister met with the leader of the main Kurdish party in an attempt to move toward a peaceful solution to the 25-year conflict between the Turkish government and the Kurdish minority in southwestern Turkey.

“Our people want unity … and an end to blood and killing,” declared Erdogan.

More than 40,000 people have died in the conflict, which began when the PKK launched a guerilla war for an independent Kurdish state in southwestern Turkey. It has cost the government an estimated $300 billion and hurt its bid to be admitted into the European Union, writes The Wall Street Journal.

Founded in the early 1970s as a Marxist-Leninist organization by Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK took up arms in 1984. It has since waged a guerilla war against the Turkish government, “that included kidnappings of foreign tourists in Turkey, suicide bombings, and attacks on Turkish diplomatic offices in Europe,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The region of Turkistan, home to between 25 and 30 million Kurds, includes parts of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan. It was nearly granted autonomous status in 1920, when the World War I Allied Powers and the soon-to-be defunct Ottoman government signed the Treaty of Sevres. However, Ataturk led Turkish nationalists in a quest to reclaim territory in Turkish War of Independence, culminating in 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne, which abandoned the plan for a separate Kurdish state.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurdish population was subject to “what amounted to a genocidal campaign” at the hands of Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s, writes PBS. In 1992, under international pressure, Iraqi troops pulled out of the region, allowing the Kurds to establish it as an autonomous region.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan Erdogan was convicted of “inciting religious hatred” in 1998 due to his recitation of an Islamist poem, reports the BBC. He was then jailed for a brief period.

His new political party, the moderate but Islamist-leaning Justice and Development Party (AKP), has ruled Turkey since 2002. The country has since seen enormous economic expansion, though secularists criticize his party’s social reform policies, which include a failed attempt to illegalize adultery, a move to re-draft the constitution to allow female students to wear Islamic-style headscarves at universities, and stiff taxation on alcohol.

Ocalan is currently serving a life sentence as the sole inmate in a prison within Istanbul city limits on the island of Yassiada in the Sea of Marmara. In recent years he has come out for a democratic solution to the conflict.